Hopping methods are known to provide performance benefits in wireless communication systems. For example, frequency hopping methods can significantly improve communication system performance by providing a frequency diversity mechanism and an interferer diversity mechanism. Similarly, time hopping methods can also improve communication system performance by providing a time diversity mechanism and an interferer diversity mechanism. Furthermore, both frequency hopping methods and time hopping methods can improve performance in fixed access or low-mobility communication systems by providing nearly independent fading from hop-to-hop in an environment that would otherwise be very slowly fading. In this latter case, the independent fading from hop-to-hop improves the effectiveness of forward error correction coding.
It is straightforward to implement a resource hopping method for a communication system which supports a plurality of communication units with uniform resource size requirements. Uniform resource size requirements imply that each communication unit operates with the same bandwidth, time-slot length, or more generally the same amount of any of the radio signal resources known in the art. In the case where the resource being hopped is the frequency of a signal, the available spectrum is divided into equal-width frequency slots, with the width of each slot being equal to the communication unit signal bandwidth. A communication unit is then able to transmit or receive within one of the available frequency slots. Frequency hopping in the communication system is facilitated by having the active communication units switch frequency slot assignments according to a set of predefined frequency hopping patterns. Switching frequency slot assignments may also be described as the changing of the center frequency of a signal to the center of a different frequency slot.
Generating frequency hopping patterns for a communication system that uses uniform bandwidth frequency slots is well known in the art. Similarly, generating time hopping patterns for communication systems with uniform sized time slots is also well known in the art. However, the prior art hopping methods are not applicable to a communication system or group of communication systems which support multiple resource sizes. Therefore, a need exists for a method, system, base station, head-end unit, and subscriber unit that provide for efficient resource hopping in a communication system or group of communication systems supporting a plurality of communication units, where different communication units may have different or varying resource size requirements.